Tag: cryptocurrency

Bankman-Fried Asks Judge To Hide Identities Of Bail Guarantors

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has asked a judge to conceal the identities of two people who will help secure his bail in addition to his parents’ house in Palo Alto, California, Bloomberg reports.

“If the two remaining sureties are publicly identified, they will likely be subjected to probing media scrutiny, and potentially targeted for harassment, despite having no substantive connection to the case,” wrote SBF’s lawyers in a letter filed on Tuesday seeking redactions of the names of the two individuals who intend to sign as sureties to his bail.

“Consequently, the privacy and safety of the sureties are “countervailing factors” that significantly outweigh the presumption of public access to the very limited information at issue,” the letter continues.

Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bail package – granted in his first appearance on US soil since his arrest in the Bahamas, was secured by his parents’ Palo Alto home, which is worth nowhere near that amount. The judge in the case also required that two people of “considerable means,” at least one of whom cannot be a relative, also sign the bond.

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FED Chairman Jerome Powell Met with FTX’s SBF in February 2022 When the FED Was Examining a Federal Digital Currency

The FED’s Jerome Powell met with then CEO and founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) in February 2022.  This was the same time that the FED was examining the implementation of a federal digital currency. 

FTX’s founder SBF is sleeping in his parents’ basement after being rated one of the youngest billionaires in the world.  The former crypto king is now facing nine counts by the DOJ in the Southern District of New York related to defrauding its customers.

During his incredible rise, SBF was meeting some of the world’s top financial operatives.  In February of 2022, SBF met with FED Chairman Jerome Powell.

It’s unknown what was shared at this meeting but a short time later in June 2022, the FED announced its plans to develop a central bank digital currency.

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SBF Was Meeting With Senior White House Officials Shortly Before FTX Collapse

FTX founder and accused crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried met with senior White House officials on at least four occasions in the months leading up to his firm’s massive implosion, Bloomberg reports.

On Sept. 8, SBF met with senior Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti in a previously unreported encounter, White House officials familiar with the matter said. The meeting was “the latest in a handful of sessions,” according to the report.

What’s more, Bankman-Fried’s brother, Gabriel, held a March meeting of his own and was also at the May 13 meeting – bringing the total number up to five meetings that involved one or bother brothers. 

According to one source, “politics” were not discussed despite SBF being a Democrat megadonor credited as a major factor in President Biden’s 2020 win. Instead, the brothers allegedly talked about general matters related to the ‘crypto industry and exchanges,’ as well as “pandemic prevention related to the foundation, Guarding Against Pandemics, run by Gabe Bankman-Fried,” according to an official.

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Alameda Wallets Suddenly Become Active Day After SBF’s Bail-‘Out’

The crypto wallets associated with now-bankrupt trading firm Alameda Research, the sister company of FTX, were seen transferring out funds just days after the former CEO Sam Bankman Fried was released on a $250 million bond.

The transfer of funds from Alameda wallets raised community curiosity, but more than that, the way in which these funds were transferred grabbed the community’s attention. The Alameda wallet was found to be swapping bits of ERC-20s for Ether/Tether, and then the ETH and USDT were funneled through instant exchangers and mixers.

For example, a wallet address that starts with 0x64e9 received over 600 ETH from wallets that belong to Alameda, part of it was swapped to USDT while the other part of the transaction was sent to ChangeNow.

On-chain analyst ZachXBT noted that the Alameda wallet was eventually swapping the funds for Bitcoin using decentralized exchanges such as FixedFloat and ChangeNow. These platforms are often used by hackers and exploiters to hide their transaction routes.

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Shadowy US Spy Firm Promises To Surveil Crypto Users For The Highest Bidder

Leaked files reviewed by MintPress expose how intelligence services the world over can track cryptocurrency transactions to their source and therefore identify users by monitoring the movements of smartphone and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, such as Amazon Echo. The contents comprehensively detonate the myth of crypto anonymity, and have grave implications for individuals and states seeking to shield their financial activity from the prying eyes of hostile governments and authorities.

The documents are among a trove related to the secret operations of Anomaly 6, a shadowy private spying firm founded by a pair of U.S. military intelligence veterans.

The company covertly embeds software development kits, or SDKs, in hundreds of popular apps, then slices through layers of “anonymized” data in order to uncover sensitive information about any individual it chooses anywhere on Earth, at any time. In all, Anomaly 6 can simultaneously monitor roughly three billion smartphone devices – equivalent to a fifth of the world’s total population – in real-time.

Having previously hawked its wares to U.S. Special Operations Command, as this journalist revealed on December 6, Anomaly 6 is now using British private military company Prevail Partners – heavily involved in the West’s proxy war in Ukraine – to market and sell its product to a variety of Western military, security, and intelligence agencies the world over. This is despite the company’s own founders fearing its global dragnet could be completely illegal under national and international data protection regimes.

The company’s international surveillance reach could be more sweeping – and invasive – than even that of the C.I.A. and N.S.A. MintPress can reveal individuals, organizations, and states seeking to bypass traditional financial structures and systems loom prominently in Anomaly 6’s mephitic crosshairs, and spying on their transactions is a pivotal component of its sales pitch to government and private clients. This Orwellian technology leaves cryptocurrency users the world over nowhere to hide.

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Sam Bankman-Fried Reveals Massive ‘Dark Money’ Donations To Republicans

Former crypto billionaire and Democratic Party megadonor Sam Bankman-Fried revealed he gave large sums of “dark” money to Republicans in a Nov. 29 interview.

He told crypto YouTuber Tiffany Fong that “all my Republican donations were dark” because “reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to a Republican” and that he “didn’t want to have that fight” with “super liberal” journalists. He claimed he was the third largest Republican donor and gave “about the same” to both parties. He did not specify how much he donated to Republicans or which GOP politicians he supported.

Campaign finance watchdog group OpenSecrets reported that Bankman-Fried donated over $36 million to Democrats and over $39 million in total, making him the sixth largest donor of the 2022 midterm election cycle. He was Democrats’ second-largest donor behind George Soros, who contributed over $128 million to Democrats this cycle.

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As Ross Ulbricht Rots in a Cage for a Website, FTX Founder Celebrated by Elite for Stealing Billions

“How did this dude steal billions of dollars and is now speaking at a summit as a free man? Make it make sense.” — the internet.

This is the question that millions of people are asking after weeks have now passed since Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX scandal unfolded. Bankman-Fried is accused of treating FTX as a ‘personal fiefdom’ as he squandered billions in cash and digital assets of his former clients.

According to a Bloomberg News report, customer funds were seemingly used to buy real-estate while Bankman-Fried himself took a $1 billion loan out from Alameda Research, a trading firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. The firm was trading billions of dollars from FTX accounts and leveraging the exchange’s native token as collateral, according to reports.

Essentially, Bankman-Fried was taking assets from his customers, without their permission, and squandering them on risky trades. According to U.S. securities law, mixing customer funds with counterparties and trading them without explicit consent — is against the law.

Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz is one of the folks throwing his hands up and demanding to know why Bankman-Fried has not been arrested or even charged.

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Russian billionaire, 53, is killed in helicopter crash near Monaco in latest crypto mystery death – ‘after another passenger cancelled at the last minute’

A Russian billionaire has become the latest cryptocurrency businessman to die in mysterious circumstances after his helicopter crashed in good weather near Monaco. 

Entrepreneur Vyacheslav Taran, 53, died after the helicopter plunged near the resort town of Villefranche-sur-Mer after taking off from Lausanne in Switzerland.

Taran is the third cryptocurrency entrepreneur to die unexpectedly in the past few weeks. 

Tiantian Kullander, 30, died ‘in his sleep’ last week, while fellow crypto millionaire Nikolai Mushegian, 29, drowned on a Puerto Rico beach after tweeting that he feared the CIA and Mossad were going to murder him. 

Since the crash that killed Taran happened in good, clear weather – and after another passenger reportedly cancelled last minute – mystery now surrounds the billionaire’s death. 

Taran, the co-founder of trading and investment platform Libertex and Forex Club, was flying from Lausanne with an experience pilot in a single-engined H130 helicopter when it crashed at around 1pm on November 25.

A 35-year-old French pilot was also killed.

The deputy public prosecutor of Nice, who visited the scene, said the fault of a third party could not be ruled out. 

Another unidentified passenger had been due to join Taran on the flight, but they cancelled last minute, according to local media. 

Taran, a highly successful offshore specialist who has lived in Monaco for the past ten years, has three children with wife Olga, founder of Hello Monaco media.

Ukrainian news agency UNIAN claimed, without citing any evidence, that Taran  was a ‘billionaire crypto businessman with likely ties to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service’. 

It alleged he was linked to the SVR foreign espionage agency and was responsible for ‘laundering Russian funds through a system of cryptocurrency operations’.

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Governor Hochul signs novel law that limits cryptomining, for now

New York is taking a first-in-the-nation step to tap the brakes on the spread of cryptocurrency mining, under legislation that Gov. Kathy Hochul signed Tuesday.

The measure comes amid growing scrutiny of the cryptocurrency industry following this month’s collapse of the FTX exchange. But New York’s measure, which passed the state Legislature in June, is specifically concerned with the environmental aspects of crypto.

“I will ensure that New York continues to be the center of financial innovation, while also taking important steps to prioritize the protection of our environment,” Hochul, a Democrat, said in a message explaining her approval.

The new law sets a two-year moratorium on new and renewed air permits for fossil fuel power plants used for energy-intensive “proof-of-work” cryptocurrency mining — a term for the computational process that records and secures transactions in bitcoin and similar forms of digital money. Proof-of-work is the blockchain-based algorithm used by bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies.

The law also requires the Department of Environmental Conservation to asses how cryptomining affects the state’s ability to meet its climate goals.

Environmentalists said New York was undermining those goals by letting cryptomining operations run their own natural gas-burning power plants.

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Howls Of Outrage After New York Times Confirms SBF To Speak Alongside Zelenskyy, Yellen

As we discussed last night, Sam Bankman-Fried has now demonstrated that he is both a pathological liar and a sociopath, the kind who in “explaining” to his employees how he stole billions (over $4 billion according to new FTX CEO John J. Ray) from the now bankrupt FTX, an act which left it insolvent and without liquidity, called it “loans” which were “generally” not used for “large amounts of personal consumption” (just “small amounts” used for such trivial items as $40 million penthouses and private jets).

And the only reason we don’t officially call him a criminal just yet, is because he has not yet confirmed he used client money from his exchange to fund his personal hedge fund, an act which would cost any other individual decades in jail… but not prominent democrats like SBF or Jon Corzine, of course. Plus it’s the US legal system’s job to do that, not ours. Although we are growing increasingly skeptical this prominent Democratic donor will ever see the inside of a courtroom.

It’s not just us: with much of the entire world demanding to know how this corpulent 30-year-old still has not been thrown in prison, or at least charged with a variety of crimes, the NYT just confirmed to the entire world what a farce the one-time paper of record has become, and how it is willing to whore itself out for clicks – not to mention prominent Democrat donors – because moments after SBF tweeted that he will be speaking with Andrew Ross-Sorkin moderated NYT “summit” on Nov 30…

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